zsuakay Highly enjoyable show about a small group of artists trying to break the mould

kellyraemathews Make for a giddy ride. Yes, it's entertaining, except when it is bogged down in angst and drawn out dialog. And the series might have a future for a night of great tongue lashing barbs with friends through each scene of excruciating MST3K "romantic" acting. Anyone can make fun of this series, but art least it's bringing the Pre-Raphs to life, and that's the fun of it. I'd even go so far as to say some of the supposedly sexy scenes are highly laughable and may make anyone brought up in America with cable in the 80s possibly even bust into a belly laugh. The sexuality here in Desperate romantics could have been more along the sensual and provocative lines of that filmed in say Lady Chatterly's Lover, or the Mists of Avalon, & etc; but with its romping is more like some exploitation film from the 70s or 80s about the Pre-Raphaelites. Even Rome and Game of Thrones, are successful though gratuitous and ridiculous in their own fashion, but at least they rarely make you question their veracity the way this series can. Anyone who enjoys Pre- Raphaelite artwork and knows about the passionate ways the Pre-Raphaelites lived and how they were the most popular painters of their day, knows a great deal was missed out on that would have made this so much better that has nothing to do with effete-art snobbery and everything to do with telling a darn good story, which was already there, and which great story of the ages is alarmingly lacking. I'm fine with that, because it means a great movie can still be in the works with more 'brightstar' & the piano type of Jane Campion director approach. The actor playing Dante has a lot of work ahead of him, and we shall see how it goes after the Hobbit. The costumes are beautiful.

angelofvic It takes a lot of hack-work to make a mess out of the incredibly intriguing and colorful story of the Pre-Raphaelite painters in Victorian England, but boy they managed it here. This is a juvenile, tedious, badly acted and worse-written mess. Evidently to make up for the lack of intelligent script or acting, the BBC threw in as much sex and nudity as possible.There's no effort to even remotely approach the truth, and we never really see the paintings, which should be the star of the whole series. Everyone agrees that the best thing about the show is the costumes, but that doesn't make for intelligent viewing. I couldn't make it past 45 minutes of the series without getting incredibly bored.I'm really disappointed lately with the hack-work -- which relies completely on visuals and titillation for its appeal -- that is coming out of the BBC in their period pieces these days. Take me back 5, 10, 15 or more years ago when the BBC was at the height of its period-piece glory. Now it's like everything else -- all show and titillation and lowbrow appeal, no intelligence or thought.

lindacamidge Like thousands of other people with an unhealthy pre-Raphaelite biography habit (okay, obsession), I could supply a long and tedious list of the "errors" in this series. But factual accuracy (as Dickens knew) can only take us so far. It was made pretty clear that Desperate Romantics isn't in that game; isn't even trying. We have been supplied with a clear weekly disclaimer, a witty title that referred to another work of fiction, and anyone following up their viewing with even the most cursory research will have discovered soon enough that one of the main characters is a complete invention.When the modern imagination takes up the past - rifling the texts, rampaging in the (usually metaphorical, but in this instance literal) graveyards and taking all manner of liberties - the result is often compelling. It's what we seem to be doing, culturally, at the moment: as Desperate Romantics ended this week, it can't just be co-incidence that a second series of the Tudors began on the same channel.The past has gone and we can never really know - viscerally - what it was like. And there is a risk that, the more we read, the more our knowledge of other days and other lives is freighted with knowledge at the expense of engagement. By some alchemy, imaginative TV and film can wreak a marvellous feat of resurrection. Costume drama of the conventional kind just doesn't do it, at least not for me. No, it's that wrenching round of the past to align with the present; the striking and deliberate archaism dropped into otherwise contemporary phrasing; flamboyant 21st century sexuality played out against nineteenth century lighting, set-dressing and costume. Your favourite bit of cultural history is here in your living room - and this time you can see and hear it live. Whether you're ready or not, whether it's realistic or not, it's come through into your 21st century head.And so this wonderful, post-modern world we live in brings the dead alive, although probably not as they would have wished. We'll never know about that, although one assumes that if any of the real-life protagonists had retained enough of an individual identity in the great beyond to know or care what modern TV has made of them, Broadcasting House would have been in receipt of a few disabling thunderbolts by now. The most deserved of these would have come from William Morris, the only character who strikes a false note in that the portrayal seems neither sympathetic nor prompted by what we know of his life and thought. Random injustice to the greatest thinker and human being, if not the most creative individual, amongst the lot of them - and he didn't really have to be in this series at all, did he? So the representation was gratuitous as well, and perhaps politically motivated.Okay - so, like all the best pleasures, my enjoyment of Desperate Romantics has been attended with some unease. As the Victorians probably knew all too well, rightness - in the sense of rectitude rather than fitness for purpose - and propriety are tricky matters to address when they compromise our joys. As we are not Victorians, these issues are unlikely to exercise a TV company in comparison with ratings, word-of-mouth buzz, or saleability on DVD (I'm already in the queue on Amazon). It is a nice little irony that the Pre-Raphaelites themselves did the mediaeval world much as theirs has now been done by, and the same parallel could be drawn between Rossetti's treatment of Dante's story and the BBC's treatment of his own.